# Hive - Is it possible to use external table on top of ES index for arbitrary FTS
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/hive-is-it-possible-to-use-external-table-on-top-of-es-index-for-arbitrary-fts/51367
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Tags:** es-hadoop
**Created:** [May 31, 2016, 3:31am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/hive-is-it-possible-to-use-external-table-on-top-of-es-index-for-arbitrary-fts/51367 "2016-05-31T03:31:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@igorkv](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/igorkv)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2016, 3:31am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/hive-is-it-possible-to-use-external-table-on-top-of-es-index-for-arbitrary-fts/51367/1 "2016-05-31T03:31:50Z")
I know that external table can be defined like this
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE artists (
id BIGINT,
name STRING,
links STRUCT\)
STORED BY 'org.elasticsearch.hadoop.hive.EsStorageHandler'
TBLPROPERTIES('es.resource' = 'radio/artists', 'es.query' = '?q=me\*');
But can I just define table without es.query parameter and later run arbitrary FTS searches?
Thanks in advance.
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### Author:  [@costin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/costin)
#### Post date: [June 1, 2016, 11:55am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/hive-is-it-possible-to-use-external-table-on-top-of-es-index-for-arbitrary-fts/51367/2 "2016-06-01T11:55:47Z")
Not sure what you mean by FTS searches.
A Hive table is an alias really and the `es.query` is part of its definitions as Hive. If that query needs to be changed, one needs to define a different table as there's no way to update the original one.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 1:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/hive-is-it-possible-to-use-external-table-on-top-of-es-index-for-arbitrary-fts/51367/3 "2017-07-06T13:24:33Z")